Research IT News

Carle and University of Illinois leadership recently approved funding to purchase a MAGNETOM 7 Tesla (7T) magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner. They join an elite network of clinical facilities (currently one of only six nationwide) to offer patients access to this technology, the highest magnetic field imaging strength commercially available in the United States approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for brain and knee scans of patients greater than 66 lbs.

The Social Media Analytics Summit (led by the Illinois Data Science Initiative and co-sponsored by Research IT, Technology Services) was a gathering of over 200 registrants that spanned academic research, industry research, social media practitioners, students, and other interested parties. The goal of the summit was to showcase what is happening in the realm of social media analytics both on the Illinois campus and beyond. A researcher from Spredfast (one of the largest social media analytics companies) and the network science group from Indiana University presented on things happening with social media analytics beyond Illinois. The State of Illinois marketing officer was also present to understand what is happening in this realm. It was an incredibly successful summit and hope that this was a springboard for many activities to come within the realm of social media analytics.

CU Hack Night is a group of civic-minded individuals who seek to find solutions to community challenges. Hack Nights began as a community group in January 2017. The weekly Tuesday night meetings include dinner, technical presentations and breakout sessions focusing on projects ranging from bee pollination to mass transit and public health. Hack nights locate publicly available data with the goal of addressing challenges in local communities. The group focuses on having fun with new and old friends to create new solutions.

For more information visit the CU Hack Night Twitter or Facebook pages.What is CU Hack Night?

A cross-campus working group collaboratively drafted questions to be used in faculty interviews to assess their sensitive data needs.  The working group also identified opportunities to improve the Institutional Review Board (IRB) process, as it pertains to HIPAA, by populating the form with choices and reducing, if not eliminating, free-form text boxes.  Faculty welcomed the suggestion for simplifying the IRB form.

University of Illinois students interested in high-performance and extreme-scale computing can sign up now for the Joint Laboratory for Extreme-Scale Computing (JLESC) Summer School, which takes place July 20-21 at NCSA. The summer school will feature two days of talks on topics like Python, MPI, OpenACC and more. Seating is first-come, first-serve. Register today.

Add event to your calendar:   iCal    Outlook 2010

Software and Data Carpentry workshops are held all around the world. The combined sessions have brought over 27,000 learners into workshops to learn to better use "R and Python to work with data, write functions, and initialize repositories in git".

The Data Carpentry community has reviewed its assessment results and published an article on the impact of these sessions.

Read the article

The Carle Illinois College of Medicine in Urbana-Champaign, which will welcome its first class of students in July, bills itself as the first medical doctorate program in the nation designed from inception to integrate engineering with medicine. Its hope is to graduate physician innovators who challenge the status quo and find solutions that reduce costs while improving access to and quality of care.

Read the Chicago Tribune article on the Carle Illinois College of Medicine.

The Technology Services Help Desk is expanding the hours for walk-in support at the Digital Computer Laboratory. Assistance via email (consult@illinois.edu), phone (217-244-7000) and walk-in is available:

Monday - Friday: 8am - 9pm

Saturday/Sunday: 12pm - 5pm

"Women Advance IT" is an IT leadership conference that will be held at the Nebraska Innovation Campus, 2021 Transformation Dr, Lincoln, NE 68508 on November 5-6, 2019. This two-day conference is open to the public. The final day of registration is October 29, 2019.This year's conference theme is, "Disruption." We want to hear about programs that encourage inclusiveness and continued education in improving diversity and inclusion, growing future leaders and adding more women in IT. This year's Emerging Tech track will focus on STEM, we encourage students to submit proposals on their research projects.  

The registration pages for the 2018 Summer Boot Camp event are now available.

This 4 day event will include MPI, OpenMP, OpenACC and accelerators and run June 4-7. This event will be presented using the Wide Area Classroom(WAC) training platform and will conclude with a special hybrid exercise contest that will challenge the students to apply their skills over the following 3 weeks and be awarded the Fifth Annual XSEDE Summer Boot Camp Championship Trophy.  In addition, an XSEDE Badge will be available to those who complete the Challenge.

https://www.psc.edu/hpc-workshop-series/summer-bootcamp-2018

https://portal.xsede.org/web/xup/course-calendar

XSEDE along with the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center are pleased to announce a one-day OpenMP workshopTuesday, January 9. This workshop is intended to give C and Fortran programmers a hands-on introduction to OpenMP programming. Attendees will leave with a working knowledge of how to write scalable codes using OpenMP. This event will be presented using the Wide Area Classroom (WAC) training platform.

Add event to your calendar:  iCal   Outlook 2010

Read the June 2017 Research IT at Tech Services Newsletter.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) is providing nearly $30 million in new funding for research in data science and engineering through its Critical Techniques, Technologies and Methodologies for Advancing Foundations and Applications of Big Data Sciences and Engineering (BIGDATA) program.

Read the full story

Read the December 2017 Technology Services Research IT Newsletter.

We would like to call your attention to upcoming events being held at NCSA:

March 6 - GPU Programming Using OpenACC

Throughout the year, the Blue Waters and Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) projects, led by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), support a variety of interdisciplinary training sessions, workshops and webinars to assist researchers in expanding their computational and data analytics knowledge and providing skills to advance their research.

The training sessions are offered as hands-on workshops that provide a convenient way for researchers to learn about the latest techniques and technologies of current interest in high performance computing (HPC). 

Registration is free and required. The sessions are scheduled for 10 AM until 4 PM Central Time in Room 1030 of the NCSA building at 1205 W. Clark St. in Urbana. RSVP on Facebook to receive regular updates.

If you need assistance finding relevant training sessions, contact us and we’ll work with you to help address your needs – bw-eot@ncsa.illinois.edu 

The Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) is a single virtual system that scientists can use to interactively share computing resources, data and expertise. People around the world use these resources and services — things like supercomputers, collections of data and new tools — to improve our planet. XSEDE is supported by the National Science Foundation.

View the January newsletter online.

Date of Event: Sept 9-13, 2019

Application Deadline: July 8, 2019

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is pleased to announce that team applications for the Blue Waters Petascale Computing Hackathon are now open.

The hackathon is intended for research and development teams wanting to:

• adapt their codes to run on petascale-class systems equipped with CPUs and/or GPUs,
• optimize applications that already run on petascale computing systems,
• accelerate machine learning and deep learning applications, or
• implement other innovative uses of petascale computing systems.

Michigan State University Information Technology and MSU IT Club25 are excited to announce the inaugural Empower Women in IT Conference on July 19, featuring keynote speaker Emily Calandrelli! They have extended a warm welcome to all people working in IT. Emily Calandrelli is an Emmy-nominated science TV host. She's featured as a correspondent on Bill Nye Saves the World and an executive producer and the host of FOX's Xploration Outer Space.

Submissions are now being accepted for the Image of Research Competition, which is co-organized by the Grad College and the Library's Scholarly Commons. The competition is open to Illinois graduate and professional students, who are "invited to submit images of their research, creative, or scholarly work for the sixth annual Image of Research competition." Submission deadline is January 22.

Date: Tuesday, January 8, 2019, 11am-1pm PST

Presenter: Mary Thomas

This webinar covers the basics of accessing the SDSC Comet supercomputer, managing the user environment,  compiling and running jobs on Comet, where to run them, and how to run batch jobs. It is assumed that you have mastered the basics skills of logging onto Comet and running basic Unix commands.  The webinar will include access to training material.

This meeting will use the Zoom conferencing system. You should receive an email with connection details when you register. If you do not have the connection details, please send an email to eot@sdsc.edu. 

Slides and recording will be made available after the webinar. 

Register for this webinar. 

Dr. Eliu Huerta Escudero and his team are extending our understanding of gravitational wave astronomy by developing new tools that detect and characterize wave sources in dense stellar environments.

Read the full story

Research IT team members Tony Rimovsky (IT Architect) and Tracy Smith (Director of Research IT) will lead multiple presentations and workshops at the Spring 2017 IT Professionals Forum on June 7-8.

Some campus academic leaders are interested in the possibility that IoT devices could help improve student success efforts, although obviously these efforts raise a number of privacy concerns. Arizona State University has launched a pilot project to see if using IoT to take attendance could help advisers reach out to students.

Read the full story.

Read the August 2017 Technology Services Research IT Newsletter.

Research Data Services offers a monthly newsletter to help researchers proactively manage their data. Focuses include organizing data, improving storage and backup security, documenting data structure, and more.

Subscribe to the newsletter at  https://go.illinois.edu/nudge

Read the October 2017 Technology Services Research IT Newsletter.

Dr. Lindsay Clark, a Research Specialist in the department of Crop Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, needed a gel imager for her work. She didn't want to spend $10,000, so built her own for considerably less.

Read the full story

Are you a Graduate Student starting your job search? Handshake, a new service offering at Illinois, can help you get started. With over 200,000 employers nation-wide, it's a fantastic way to get yourself seen.

Read the full story.

As you are aware, a partial federal government shutdown has continued into the new year. While NIH and the Department of Education are funded, others such as NSF, NASA, NOAA, USDA, NIST, and NEH are not.

Illinois Sponsored Programs Administration (SPA) has developed these FAQs to address some questions that members of the Illinois research community may have.

Agency Contingency Plans and FAQs can be found on the OMB website:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/information-for-agencies/agency-contingency-plans/

Registration is now open for the 4th AgTech Summit, March 5-6 at the Research Park. Champaign-Urbana is one of the premier AgTech hubs in the nation, and we are uniquely positioned to bring together entrepreneurs, investors, academics, and industry for learning, networking and advancing this sector. 

This new approach will enable astronomers to study gravitational waves using minimal computational resources, reducing time to discovery and increasing the scientific reach of gravitational wave astrophysics.

Read more

This competitive fellowship program provides a unique opportunity for faculty and researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign by offering seed funding for startup collaborative research projects.

Read more

The Social and Behavioral Sciences Research Initiative, with support from the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research both directly and via the Campus Research Board, requests proposals for its 2018 Small Grant Program. This program brings together interdisciplinary research teams to develop projects that show promise for external funding. Applications will be accepted until April 28, 2018.

Chancellor Robert J. Jones and chemistry professor Catherine J. Murphy have been elected as members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the oldest honorary societies in the nation.

They are among more than 200 individuals with compelling achievements in academia, business, government and public affairs to be elected to the academy this year.

Thanks in part to the power of the Blue Waters supercomputer and the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE), both headquartered at NCSA and supported by the National Science Foundation, a massive research collaboration was able to capture a picture of a black hole for the first time ever.

NCSA Faculty Fellow and Assistant Professor at the Gies College of Business at the University of Illinois, Mao Ye’s research lies at the intersection of big data, high-performance computing and the economics, and finance realm. Using computing resources, Ye tackles large amounts of data currently being collected by companies and finance institutions. “The high-performance computing is more like a tool,” he said, “because we are basically doing big data research.”

The University Library is one of eight partners launching the Data Curation Network. The three-year effort is backed by a $526,438 grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The Data Curation Network will serve as “a cross-institutional staffing model that seamlessly connects a network of expert data curators to local datasets and to supplement local curation expertise.”

“Deep curation of datasets is a clear case where no one library will be able to hire and retain staff to cover all disciplines, data types, and file formats,” said Heidi Imker, director of the Research Data Service at Illinois. "This is an incredibly important—and incredibly challenging—effort, and we're thrilled to lend our expertise, learn from others, and contribute to advancing data services in academic libraries."

Visit the Data Curation Network website at http://datacurationnetwork.org.   

Read the full news release from the University of Minnesota at https://www.continuum.umn.edu/2018/04/launching-the-data-curation-network/.

Chemists at the University of Illinois have successfully produced fuels using water, carbon dioxide, and visible light through artificial photosynthesis. By converting carbon dioxide into more complex molecules like propane, green energy technology is now one step closer to using excess carbon dioxide to store solar energy – in the form of chemical bonds – for use when the sun is not shining and in times of peak demand.

The Call for Proposals is now open for iConference 2020 in Borås, Sweden. The theme is Sustainable Digital Communities and there is a great deal of flexibility in presentation formats, from full papers, to workshops to colloquia. Submission deadlines vary by track, beginning September 16.

The panel conversations on the 5th should be particularly engaging. Two authors of my favorite books in 2018 are panelists: Safiya Noble and Virginia Eubanks will both be speaking. Their respective works Algorithms of Oppression and Automating Inequality, are some of the best works on the systemic problems of big data processing that I have read in the past several years. 

For more information visit https://publish.illinois.edu/humanitiesartsinageofbigdata/schedule/

Dr. Xiaohui Chen, Assistant Professor in Statistics, and his team are mining data to help neuroscientists find the mechanism that makes neurodegenerative diseases tick.

Read the full story

We are seeing a surge in firms with offers to take institutions' data so that they can reformat it and make it available as dashboards, with trends and models. It is time to ask: Who is doing our data laundry, and why?

Read the full story

Read the September 2017 Technology Services Research IT Newsletter.

The Health Make-a-Thon is a competition for makers, citizen scientists, and anyone in Champaign County with ideas for improving human health. A panel of experts from the University of Illinois and beyond will review submissions and choose the best. Finalists will pitch their ideas for a chance to win $10,000 in Health Maker Lab resources to create a real prototype of their idea.

President Donald J. Trump is expected to sign an executive order Feb. 11, titled "Maintaining American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence." The order aims to promote sustained investment and innovation in artificial intelligence (AI), enhance access to resources for AI research, and train a next-generation AI research workforce. National Science Foundation (NSF) Director France Córdova, who will participate in the signing ceremony, issued the following statement.

Data, as well as the software used in the creation and usage of data, are now a major part of scientific research and education, to the point where many groups are pushing for them to be on par with paper publications with regards to dissemination as well as reproducibility. The preservation, sharing, and use of these digital products, however, is far from trivial, with many conceptual, technical, and social complexities that are now being addressed in fields such as computer science, information science, and the evolving cross-disciplinary field of data science.

Deputy Director of Scientific Software & Applications at NCSA, Kenton McHenry has worked with scientific communities for over 10 years across biology, geoscience, and engineering to develop a service that would mutually support a need at the intersection of all of these communities with regards to utilizing data, specifically data transformations. As a principal investigator of the NSF-funded Cyberinfrastructure for Sustained Scientific Innovation (CSSI) - Clowder, McHenry and his team explore tools around the notion of active curation in support scientific data sharing, management, and reuse.

Active curation addresses the need for curation around scientific data, such as annotating data with metadata describing it, in order to make it discoverable and usable by others. Specifically, active curation distributes the curation process throughout the lifecycle of the data, leveraging analysis/machine learning to automate a good portion of the process. The Clowder framework provides an open source Dropbox-like capability that allows data to be shared as easily as within Dropbox, but further supports the active curation and exploration of data so that data can be more easily published in community data archives at a later time. This effort further addresses the sustainability of scientific tools such as Clowder, exploring potential service models and brings together a very diverse community made up of academic, education, industrial, and international partners all requiring similar capabilities.

ABOUT NCSA

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign provides supercomputing and advanced digital resources for the nation's science enterprise. At NCSA, University of Illinois faculty, staff, students, and collaborators from around the globe use advanced digital resources to address research grand challenges for the benefit of science and society. NCSA has been advancing one third of the Fortune 50® for more than 30 years by bringing industry, researchers, and students together to solve grand challenges at rapid speed and scale.

Are you a Graduate Student starting your job search? Handshake, a new service offering at Illinois, can help you get started. With over 200,000 employers nation-wide, it's a fantastic way to get yourself seen.

Read the full story.

The library’s spring schedule for the Savvy Researcher Workshop series has been released.

Join us for 50 minute, hands-on workshops that will help you improve your research and information management skills.

Digital Humanities-related sessions include:

Building Digital Exhibitions with OmekaDigital

Publishing with ScalarBasics of Data Visualization

Introduction to Text Mining Concepts and Sources

Topic Modeling Theory and Practice

Messy Data? Clean it up with OpenRefine!

Making Scanned Text Machine Readable through Optical Character Recognition

Using the DPLA (Digital Public Library) Primary Resources for Research

GIS for Research I: Introduction to GIS Concepts, Software, and Data

GIS for Research II: GIS Research, Data Management, and Visualization

For more details and registration:   http://go.library.illinois.edu/savvyresearcher

All sessions held in the Main Library, Room 314 unless otherwise noted.

Registration is now open for the 2019 Linux Clusters Institute (LCI) Intermediate Workshop, which will be held May 13-17, 2019 at the University of Oklahoma. This workshop provides education and technical training for the deployment and use of computing clusters to the high performance computing community worldwide. Those who have attended an Introductory LCI workshop in the past are especially encouraged to attend.

If you have some experience as an HPC system administrator and want to expand your skills, this is the workshop for you. In just five days you will: 

Strengthen your overall knowledge of HPC system administrationFocus in depth on file systems and storage, HPC networks, job schedulers, and CephGet hands-on training and discuss real-life stories with experienced HPC administrators 

Register: http://linuxclustersinstitute.org/workshops/interm19/register.php 

Not ready for the intermediate workshop? LCI is offering an Introductory Workshop in August 2019.

Contact Leslie Froeschl at lfroesh@illinois.edu with any questions.

SPaRC'Ed annually solicits applications for participation in the SPaRC'Ed certification series. The SPaRC'Ed committee reviews and selects applicants based upon multiple factors, including their role in sponsored projects administration, their unit's degree of sponsored projects and research involvment, and the applicant's personal statement. Applications of all experience and knowledge levels are encouraged to apply.

The application form can be accessed from the link below during the application period.

The 2019-2020 SPaRC'Ed application period is now open and will close on Friday, April 19, 2019.

Click here to apply.